An impression has prevailed--and has gained credence at some times and in some places, that, in his later years, and in the presence of a society differently organized from that which he found at home, the ardor of his love of country was quenched:--that he became less an American as he saw more of other lands. What is it to be an American? The definition may vary, in different regions. What was it, always, with him? If to be an American means merely to be successful in a large and worldly way--whether in politics, or in business, or in letters; to out-talk, out-spend, out-bid, out-invent others; to drive faster; to travel farther; to push harder; to build bigger houses; to found more richly endowed Universities; to construct greater Observatories; to establish more and larger public libraries:--if to do these and similar things is all that goes to make an American--the charge is true. In such sense, Mr. Lowell was not so good an American as some others. But, in the larger and truer sense:--in striving for all that goes to make a people more noble in aim, more humane, more intelligent, more peace-loving, more free, more self-respecting, more artistic, in short more fully men and women of the best type,--Mr. Lowell may well be accepted as the representative American, of whom we should all be proud. It was his rare fortune to be Minister of the United States to Great Britain during a most interesting period. The serious troubles which had grown out of the wrong we had suffered at her hands during the civil war had been happily ended. The era of reconciliation had begun. In what light should we stand before the world, after winning the great verdict in the Alabama case:--as a community of sharp traders, condoning a great national wrong for a petty sum of money?--or as a people striving chiefly for the maintenance of the true principles of national honor and international comity? Mr. Lowell, perhaps more than any one in America, was the man who, by training, by culture, by scholarship, by attainments in the world of letters, by unsullied character, was fitted to present to the English people an embodiment of Americanism, in its best expression. More than that:--he was eminently fitted to illustrate that idea, and give it weight, dignity and authority. In all his intercourse with the aristocratic representatives of privileged countries, he--the plain, untitled representative of a democratic government--proud to stand for a people with whom liberty and equality were supreme terms--more than held his own in every trial of intellect, of courtesy, of wit, of all that wins in society and the world. So, at last, no circle was complete without him:--to claim him as guest was matter of emulation.